HARARE (AP):

Roman Catholic bishops marked Easter Sunday with an unprecedented message to President Robert Mugabe to end oppression and leave office through democratic reform or face a mass revolt.

"The confrontation in our country has now reached a flashpoint," said the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference in a pastoral message pinned up at churches throughout the country.

"As the suffering population becomes more insistent, generating more and more pressure through boycotts, strikes, demonstrations and uprisings, the state responds with ever harsher oppression through arrests, detentions, banning orders, beatings and torture," the nine bishops said.

The majority of Zimbabwe's Christians - including Mugabe - are Roman Catholics. Several thousand worshippers who packed the cathedral in Harare clustered around the notice boards to read the message after morning Mass yesterday.

Although the Catholic bishops - especially Pius Ncube, the archbishop of the second city of Bulawayo, have criticised the government in the past, the tone of this year's pastoral message was the most strident since independence from Britain in 1980.

A grievous crisis

In his traditional Easter address from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI singled out Zimbabwe among other troubled countries.

"Zimbabwe is in the grip of a grievous crisis," he said.

The letter, entitled 'God Hears the Cries of the Oppressed', likened human and democratic rights abuses under Mugabe to the oppression of biblical pharaohs and Egyptian slave masters.

"Oppression is sin and cannot be compromised with," it said.

"Many people in Zimbabwe are angry, and their anger is now erupting into open revolt in one township after another," said the bishops.

"In order to avoid further bloodshed and avert a mass uprising, the nation needs a new people-driven constitution that will guide a democratic leadership chosen in free and fair elections," it said.